Conventionally, there have been word pair acquisition apparatuses in which a small amount of word pairs that are desired to be extracted is provided and patterns are acquired from the word pairs. Also, the conventional word pair acquisition apparatuses acquire word pairs co-occurring with the acquired patterns (see, for example, Non-Patent Document 1).    [Non-Patent Document 1] P. Pantel and M. Pennacchiotti. Espresso: Leveraging generic patterns for automatically harvesting semantic relations. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (COLINGACL-06), pages 113-120, 2006.